A man opens the LinkedIn social network app on his smartphone at the breakfast table in Berlin on July 5, 2024.
Alicia Windzio | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Every morning, Emily Ritter spends 15 minutes in bed checking her Instagram, Messages, Slack and Strava apps and playing The New York Times’ Connections and Strands games on her phone. Recently, LinkedIn has been part of the mix.
Ritter, a marketing executive at San Francisco-based startup Front, discovered a logic puzzle called Queens about two months ago through a promotion on LinkedIn, which is best known as the place where professionals connect and recruiters find talent.
“It’s just kind of a fun brainteaser,” Ritter said. “It’s a way to do something sort of relaxing, but in an engaging way.”
LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $27 billion in 2016, rolled out its first three games in May, and Queens has emerged as the hottest of the trio.
On Tuesday, the company launches game number four, and it’s going deeper into logic puzzles with a title called Tango. In the game, a user is presented with a grid, and a few squares are filled in with a sun or a moon. It’s up to the player to fill in each remaining square with a sun or a moon, based on a few rules.
While LinkedIn consistently ranks as a top 100 app on iOS in the U.S., it’s below other social apps like TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and X as well as Meta services such as Facebook and Instagram, according to industry researcher Sensor Tower.
Games represent a form of content that, when done right, keep people coming back. And it’s a market that Microsoft knows well. The company introduced its first Xbox console in 2001, and now has a games business generating $22 billion in annual revenue following the purchase of Activision Blizzard a year ago.
Yet gaming wasn’t a part of LinkedIn for the first seven years after the acquisition, which was Microsoft’s biggest ever until the Activision deal. Daniel Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief, says the games are designed to be played a little bit each day, perhaps when the day begins or as a short interlude between projects. Hopefully, they’ll spark conversations with colleagues and industry peers.
“You start with your game score and you move on to other areas,” Roth said.
It’s a familiar model. The New York Times offers eight games, and made a splash in the market in 2022 with the purchase of viral word game Wordle. The newspaper publisher saw tens of millions of new users and added subscribers after the acquisition.
LinkedIn, which generates revenue from recruiting services and advertising, isn’t planning to charge people to play its games, a spokesperson said. In the fiscal year that ended on June 30, LinkedIn generated $16 billion in revenue, or about 7% of Microsoft’s total.
The unit “continues to see accelerated member growth and record engagement,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s July earnings call, months after membership crossed the 1 billion mark.
LinkedIn has been busy this year. It has built artificial intelligence features to help job seekers and students of its online courses. It’s been bringing a TikTok-like video tab to the LinkedIn mobile app.
And LinkedIn released its eighth annual list of the top 50 large companies to work at in the U.S.
Fun is a key part of the best workplaces, whether it be through banter, recreational sports or a happy hour, said Lakshman Somasundaram, the LinkedIn product management director who leads up games.
“It’s not just meetings and documents,” he said. “It’s important to us that LinkedIn reflects what the world’s best workplaces feel like.”
In September, LinkedIn surveyed around 900 members, and 83% said it was their favorite game the site offered, the spokesperson said.
Queens requires players to drop one crown emoji in each row and one in each column of a grid, a format that’s “a little bit sudoku-like,” said Thomas Snyder, the game’s architect. Snyder, a scientist formerly with Freenome and Adaptive Biotechnologies, won the 2018 World Puzzle Championship.
‘Sooner give up my left arm’
Joe Weinman, a former AT&T executive in New Jersey, has solved Queens for 46 days in a row. His streak would be at 90, but he forgot to play one day, he said in a LinkedIn message.
“I’d sooner give up my left arm than give up Queens,” he wrote, adding that he used to be on LinkedIn once a week.
And now there’s a place for Weinman and other addicts to congregate. In July Somasundaram started posting daily videos that reveal solutions to Queens puzzles on a dedicated page for the game. The videos garner hundreds of comments.
Somasundaram said he plans to produce videos about Tango.
Ritter has watched some of the Queens videos. She said she’s learned how to get through the puzzles relatively quickly.
“I guess I have just sort of figured out some of the tricks,” Ritter wrote in a LinkedIn message, adding that she would probably enjoy new challenging games.
When LinkedIn decided to launch a new logic game, employees came up with a few principles and brought them to Snyder. He sent back samples, and LinkedIn team members suggested additions, said LinkedIn games editor Paolo Pasco, who has constructed crossword puzzles for The New York Times.
In Tango, the objective is to get each row and column of the grid to have the same number of suns and moons. No more than two of a kind can be next to each other vertically or horizontally. An equal sign between two squares means the two must be the same, and an X between them requires the symbols to be opposites.
It’s a simple concept, but the puzzles get harder as the week progresses, just like The New York Times’ crossword puzzle.
LinkedIn promotes its games on its homepage and in the app’s My Network tab. But 40% of the people who play come in through a link, which might have been shared in a conversation or a post. After completing a game, LinkedIn makes it easy to copy your score and a link so you can send the information to connections or publish a post.
Between the links and the daily videos, people are coming back for more. LinkedIn’s App Store ranking tends to dip on the weekends, according to Sensor Tower, suggesting less usage when people aren’t at work.
“Professionals are playing games regularly, even on the weekends,” the spokesperson said.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.